To what extent does personality predict employee performance How do Essay

To what extent does personality predict employee performance How do personality traits translate into individual's profession - Essay Example Behaviorists assumed people to be no more than a set of a myriad of learned responses to various environmental stimuli and reinforcements (Ayers, 2007). However, most of the contemporary research has opted to reject these two views due to their extremism. Contemporary research now takes a more commonsense approach in attempting to clearly define personality, the approach taken by this research is careful not to overlook some of the common traits such as sociability and persistence which are key in the determination of an individual’s behavior (Ayers, 2007). Personality traits are defined as various dimensions of a single individual’s personal differences they are essentially a set of distinguishing characteristics and qualities of a given individual. Traits determine the readiness of a person to consistently act, think or feel in a relatively similar manner when exposed to a variety of situations and stimuli (Ayers, 2007). The Different Concepts and Theories Used to Det ermine and Individual’s Personality and Their Personality Traits There are essentially two approaches that are used in the determination of an individual’s personality. These two approaches are the idiographic and nomothetic approach. The idiographic approach essentially tries to study the given individual’s personality as compared to another individual. In trying to gain a critical and deeper understanding of the individual, it looks at the person’s complexity, uniqueness as well as the richness. Over time, there are several key concepts and theories pertaining to personality that have been developed. One of these theories is the theory formulated by Carl Jung that is used to classify individuals as either having and introverted personality or an extraverted one. According to this theory, introverts tend to be reliable, shy, quiet and often like to plan things well in advance, this is in addition to their often being pessimistic. Inversely, extraverts ar e seen to extremely sociably as they often do not like being alone, they often tend to have a lot of friends, have an optimistic nature and tend to enjoy parties. In formulating this theory, Jung is seen to make a personality type matrix that is mainly based on four key functions that are normally used by people in the event that they are other individuals, situations or things. These four functions are feeling, sensing, intuition and thinking. According to Jung, everyone tends to make use of these functions but the inherent proportions tend to be vastly different. Jurgen Eysenck also developed a trait theory that has continued to be largely influential. The theory developed by Jurgen have been shown to mainly be genetically based. The model developed by Jurgen offers a means that helps in appropriately linking behavior, traits and types. The theory claims that each individual person essentially has a certain set of various identifiable traits which eventual form a trait cluster and the successive personality structure is then found to be hierarchical (Hayes, 2005). It was Charles Horton Cooley who was responsible for the development of the looking class self-concept.